Russian is used on 5.9% of all websites, very slightly ahead of German and far behind English.

The Russian Internet domain .ru became the most popular country-code top level domain in September 2011 and has been growing ever since. But Russian is used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, also on 88.7% of the former Soviet Union domain .su, a domain which is supposed to be phased out, but still gaining popularity for whatever reason. Russian is also the most used language in several countries that belonged to the Soviet Union: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan.

Russian is somewhat less used on top sites, it is only language no 6 on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German an Japanese.

Most Russian language websites are using UTF-8 now as character encoding (62.0%), a minority are still using Windows-1251 (37.5%), and very few use KOI8-R (0.4%).

If we look at the trend in the last few years, is seems very likely that Russian will stay at rank #2 for a while. Chinese would of course be the logical candidate to move up that far, but we don't see that yet in the statistics.